Make Life Easy with Must Have Wordpress Plugins

When I first moved my wahm work at home mom blog from a free site and installed it on wordpress and my own hosting I realized there were a couple serious things I would have to take care of that wordpress used to manage for me.

This is where plugins come in. The wonderful world of wordpress plugins. Much like looking for a "perfect" theme you can get lost in the wonderful and seriously expansive world of wordpress plugins.

Instead of leaving you confused and wondering just what plugins you need to install I'm going to make it easy for you and just tell you ~ from my many hours researching this ~ the ones you must have and then the ones that are just fun to have (and also serve a purpose). These are the actual plugins I have installed on all my blogs.

SPAM~ this is one of those things wordpress used to manage for me, now I'm responsible for dealing with all the spam comments that come in. (it is really strange the kind of comments you find) This is the first and in my opinion MOST important plugin and the first one you should install. It is in fact, the same spam management system that wordpress uses. Akismet. This plugin will manage all your spam comments, it will delete them after 30 days, you don't even really need to think about it. (I sometimes look through my captured spam comments just to see what's in there, but I'm kinda weird)It is an excellent plugin, I have never had any spam get through, and I think I've only had 1 or 2 comments that were real end up in the spam folder. This plugin will save you tons of time weeding through spam comments. Download Akismet ~ a must have plugin.

All In One SEO Pack ~ The second most important plugin and definitely the must have plugin for SEO. This will allow you to optimize your posts for searchability. The functions in this one plugin used to be in a couple different ones, but now it's nicely bundled in one place.

Smart Update Pinger ~ This plugin pings your blog each time you add new content. You can add a personal list of sites you want pinged.

Google Sitemap ~ This will build and install a google sitemap for you site. All you have to do is install the plugin and fill in a couple blanks. It does all the work for you.

All in one Adsense and YPN ~ This plugin allows you to easily and effortlessly add adsense or Yahoo ads, or both to your site. It is really easy. I only added this plugin recently because I wasn't using adsense on my sites. However, I started earning money from adsense as soon as I installed it.

Tagalize It ~ This allows you to tag keywords to both technorati and ice rocket.

What Would Seth Godin Do? ~ A funny sounding plugin with an important job. This plugin uses cookies to place a message on your blog reminding new readers to sign up for your RSS feed. You can set the number for how many times readers see the message. After they have visited more than that number they will no longer see the message.

Those are the MUST HAVE plugins ~ here are a few I have on my blog and appreciate the work they do for me.

Viper's Video Quicktags ~ This plugin will be considered a must have for anyone who posts a lot of video on their blog. It allows you to one click add video from a variety of sources. It gives you a button on your blogging task bar.

Wordpress.com Stats ~ I started my blog at wordpress.com. I got used to the little view graph. I love it. I was sad when I moved my blog and didn't think I would be able to get the chart anymore. Then I found this plugin. It's exactly the same as wordpress.com. Of course google analytics has more info, but I love the simple chart. :) You can use both.

Sociable ~ This is a social bookmarking plugin that will put icons to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of your posts. I have tried a couple different social bookmarking plugins and this one is my favorite. You can choose which buttons you want included.

Related Posts ~ I have this installed and have yet to figure out how to make it work right. However, I'm still recommending it because I know all the blogs I read regularly that have it I read waaaay more articles on than the ones that don't.

This is the last one, and may seem a little redundant, but I am really working on getting my RSS subscriber numbers up, so I added it.

Subscribe Remind ~ This plugin adds a little reminder at the end of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed if they enjoyed the post.

There you have it ~ my plugin list, both the must haves, and the just for funs. If you are hosting your own blog you will find these plugins help your SEO as well as make your life much easier.

Jackie :)